My Jekyll workflow: Part 3

Welcome again to the My Jekyll workflow series. In part 1 I wrote about my basic workflow and in part 2 on how to improve it.

There’s still more room to improve and I drove that way.

Going simple with Amazon storage

I want to offload my little VPS resources and bandwidth by hosting /static files to Amazon S3 storage. It is friendly to use and cheap: for a blog it should cost less then $1 per month.

First of all I created an account on AWS. They give you 12-month free tier upon sign up.

Configuring AWS

Configure AWS is easy and flexible. I created a bucket in seconds and (mandatory) enabled the static file hosting option for it (read more about here).

Next, I’ve created two IAM roles, one admin with full access to S3 and one to set with access to only the said bucket. JSON-based policies are very powerful and provide fine-grained access control. Head over here to know how to setup an IAM role with read and write access to a specific bucket. I made available the policy I use here.

Uploading statics to S3

Upload on the go to S3 can be challenging, especially on iOS. Since there’s no solution in sight, I decided to write an app for that and release it in the App Store by the end of this year.

Right now, I use SFTP to perform on-the-go static file uploads. I already had a repository for static resources (see part 2), so I’ve set up aws cli on server and added a post-run script in jekyll-deployer config.json. It’s a few bash lines. It commits new static resources (I upload via SFTP) and then syncs the entire repo to S3. It is only run when deploying master.

Nginx redirect

Next step is to tell nginx to redirect requests to https://fpira.com/static to the S3 bucket. I did so using a rewrite in the website configuration.

To avoid extra charges, I’ve added the rewrite only in the stable config letting it load static files at https://unstable.mywebsite.com from the VPS. See the excerpt below.

location /static/ {
    rewrite ^/static/(.*) https://fpira-s3-media.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/fpira.com_static/static/$1 break;
    expires max;
}

Final words

This was the last post of the series. I hope you enjoyed it. I’ll keep on improving my workflow and publishing about it.

Thanks for reading.